U.S. election both good and bad news for Whistler

Big Bird has spoken and the rest of the world has breathed a sigh of relief. Well, except maybe for Pakistan. Would someone please get Mr. Romney a towel?

With too few ballots to rig and too few chads left hanging, the black guy with the terrorist name whipped the white Mormon with no discernible soul and The Donald was calling for revolution in the streets. How can you not enjoy politics American style?

As tempting as it might be to claim the forces of reason carried the day in the Great Satan Tuesday, the day wasn't so much carried as it was equally distributed to almost 117 million pairs of hands. With nearly that many people voting, President Obama's edge over his opponent was a razor-thin 2.6 million votes — 51.1 per cent to 48.9 per cent as of early Wednesday morning. Whatever philosophical differences divided the country Monday night — philosophy probably having very little to do with it — still cleaves it cleanly Wednesday morning.

But there is good news and bad news rolling out of the U.S. election. Some of it cause for celebration and some of it simply threatening to Whistler's very success.

So it's late Tuesday evening or early Wednesday morning. You're Mitch McConnell. What are you going to do with your life? Well, first off, you're probably going to ask "Who the heck is Mitch McConnell?" Fair enough. As a Canadian, there's no earthly reason you should know. So I'll tell you.

Mitch McConnell is the Minority — read Republican — Senate leader. He's the old white guy with jowls that have their own Zip Code. At age 70, he's the longest serving senator in Kentucky's history, which tells you most of what you need to know about Kentucky.

After the 2010-midterm elections when the Republicans took back the House of Representatives, (sorry, I know I'm losing some of you) it was Senator McConnell who outlined the Party's strategy for dealing with the most pressing problems facing the nation. Mitch said, "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president."

And so, the Republicans didn't do anything about the wars they'd started, the terrorists they hadn't captured, the economy they'd sent into the toilet, the jobless recovery, climate change, or any of the myriad issues people seemed to want their government to tackle. Instead, they stonewalled Obama at every opportunity, even refusing to agree to positions they'd earlier proposed on several issues simply because they didn't want it to seem like the administration was getting anything done.

Not surprisingly, not much got done. More surprisingly, almost half the voters stuck with them. Go figure.